Managing expectations

What is the cost of failure in public sector cuts? It's hard to gauge but having an experienced professional at the helm may reduce the risk

Up and down the country, boards and trusts are looking into areas to make savings. Hopefully, they'll look at the impact and risks of the change – not just in the departments affected but along the vertical chain of internal and external suppliers and customers. Let's also hope that they will commit to assured delivery of improvements and savings.

There are three main ways of making savings:

1. Reduce or cut services (and staff).

2. Create an environment where customers (or patients) can help reduce their impact on public sector spend by self help, staying a little healthier, requesting minor support early enough to keep the service need at the lower cost end.

3. Reduce the cost of the service delivery through efficiencies, eliminating waste, working with suppliers to lower their costs and margins.

Reduction in services can result in more serious interventions down the line – at much higher cost.

We must work collaboratively to quantify the fall-out– before there's a cost in terms of money or wellbeing or life.

Point two requires good facilities at the low-cost or generic "entry level", and an acceptance by us, the public that the way we manage our expectation can contribute significantly.

Sometimes ideas about savings are lost through unwillingness to stand up and be counted, or a reluctance to embrace radical change and upheaval.

Don't be surprised then to find that managers and directors who could have made changes but didn't, are subject to a drive to replace them with the brave.

Many of the brave may be experts in business efficiency, turnaround, and particularly in delivering complex and fast-track change against the odds. Enter the professional interim manager. This should be their hour.

In this new era of efficiency, the objective for councils and hospitals to deliver services with higher productivity, lower costs and unquestioned quality is paramount.

Why then would they not ensure that the change is delivered by a professional who has proven track record of change delivery rather than an employee who has not taken the initiative – by grasping or even creating opportunities?

Locally, if a change project has a £100,000 investment but can deliver a £3m, £5m or £10m saving, who would consider putting such a task in the hands of someone inexperienced and with no track record, at a cost of £25,000?

Even if the benefits are only £1m a year, the cost of a 3 month delay could be £240,000, nearly 10 times the fee. Whereas, the cost of a more assured delivery of benefits might be £50,000 but the risk of failure is greatly reduced so the net impact of putting a professional in place could, in that instance be £215,000 less than that of the less experienced implementer.

Hilary Husbands is a practising interim and a director of the Institute of Interim Management

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